Someone in Richmond is trying to sell a single bubble tea drink for $50 on Facebook Marketplace.
A Noms Mag community member spotted the listing, which features a MACU Tea Strawberry Chi-Chi priced at CA$50 with the caption “last one forever” and the very firm note of “no low ball.”
The listing has been live for five weeks now.
According to the seller’s Facebook profile, their bio reads “pls support me i’m a broke nursing student.”
For context, MACU Tea abruptly closed three of its Metro Vancouver locations last month, and the Richmond location saw a 40-minute line on its final day as fans rushed to get their last orders in.
The closures left a gap in the city’s fruit tea scene, and the demand clearly did not go away.
It has since been confirmed that a new fruit tea chain called Alfa Tea is taking over the three shuttered MACU Tea spots.
Just this past weekend, the Burnaby Alfa Tea outpost soft opened to massive lines, with many showing up specifically for what has been described as a MACU Tea dupe.
The Marketplace listing is for a Strawberry Chi-Chi, which is not even MACU’s famous mango drink.
That makes the $50 ask even more wild.
And considering the drink was purchased back on March 9, it has been sitting for nearly a month at this point.
We will leave it to your imagination on what that drink looks like now.
To be fair, this is not the first time people have tried to flip limited or discontinued food and drink items on resale platforms.
When Starbucks released their glass bear cups and Hello Kitty collab cups, people were reselling those for over $100.
For anyone genuinely missing MACU Tea, there is still one location open in Kerrisdale, which is operated by a different franchise owner and was not affected by the closures.
So you do not actually need to spend $50 on a five-week-old Strawberry Chi-Chi from Facebook Marketplace.
But the fact that this listing exists at all says everything about the chokehold MACU Tea had on this city.
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